A Day Never Forgotten
by Sth10
Summary: Ten years after that fateful Saturday, a very different Andy returns to reminisce on what might have been.


AUTHOR'S NOTE: New to BC writing, old to fanfic. Love the movie; love Andy even more. Let me know what you think! Oh, and I'm English, so excuse the lack of US spellings.  
  
A DAY NEVER FORGOTTEN  
  
It's been so long since I was last here. A decade has passed, but not a day has gone by when I didn't think of this place and what happened here. This is where I grew. These walls watched me change from a naïve kid to a moody teenager and, finally, become a man. But not the man I am today. Today not even my best friends would recognise me. My best friends. Now I know who those people were. Back then I didn't.  
  
I have never forgotten that Saturday. I never will. I wish I could say it changed us all but, of course, it didn't. We didn't want to be changed. As soon as Monday rolled around, everything went back to normal. It was like that day had never happened.  
  
I was as guilty as everyone else. I was a popular jock, liked by the guys and pursued by countless girls. I liked it that way, with my equally popular, good-looking friends. At least, I thought they were my friends. I never considered, even for a minute, that the Breakfast Club were better friends to me in a few short hours than people I had known all my high school career. Popularity is everything when you're young. I was no different.  
  
I do regret. I wish I had been as strong in my mind as I was in body. If I had been, I would have stood up to the people who bullied Brian and Allison, who called Bender a dope head and Claire an airhead. But I didn't. I just stood by and watched, even joined in if required to. I couldn't bring myself to alienate myself from the people that had given me my reputation, cemented me as Shermer's number one jock. It was important to be accepted.  
  
I never knew what Allison really thought of me. After that day, we never spoke again. I hardly ever saw her and if I did, I could never stop and speak to her. I don't think she even acknowledged my presence. The guys said she was crazy, but I refused to believe it. For eight long years I wouldn't accept that Allison, the girl that had somehow found a place in my heart, was crazy.  
  
In senior year, I dated Claire. It was practically a requirement. I was the school's sports star and she was Shermer's princess. She was Homecoming Queen to my King. It lasted less than a month. We both knew we weren't meant to be together. I always wondered if her heart really did lie with Bender but I never got the chance to find out. Neither did she.  
  
Bender was kicked out of Shermer before he turned eighteen. He was caught selling dope at the school gates. We were told he went to jail but no one ever found out for real. Whatever happened, none of us ever saw John Bender again. He disappeared. I wonder if he's still in jail. He might be happily married with kids. He might even be dead. I guess we'll never know.  
  
My eighteenth year wasn't smoothest either. My dad died a couple of months before I graduated high school, killed instantly in a car smash on the freeway. With him died my wrestling career. As soon as he'd gone, I realised that I'd come to hate the sport that had been part of my life for as long as I could remember. Wrestling was the only thing that held my dad and I together. With him gone, I had no need for it any longer.  
  
So I quit. Just walked away after nearly ten years. Wrestling meant nothing to me by that time. I'd only carried on competing for Dad, just like I'd studied hard and expressed interest in the Ivy League for him. I never wanted any of it. That was all Dad's dream. Never mine.  
  
Instead, I discovered something I could really love for myself. Football. It had always been there in my heart but wrestling had always pushed it out into insignificance. I'd never been allowed to play at the top level in case I got injured. Suddenly I had no more barriers keeping me from the field. I took to it like a duck to water. I'd always known I loved sport, that it was my true passion in life, but I'd never found the one I was meant for. Then football came along. That was all I needed. Suddenly life was better than it had been for a long time.  
  
I got a scholarship to play at Columbia. At graduation, Brian came up and threw an arm round my shoulders in congratulation. I'm ashamed to say I pulled away from him. Even then I had to play my role in front of my friends. I still haven't forgotten the look on his face. I felt like the biggest bastard to grace the planet but minutes later I saw laughing with my football buddies and had forgotten all about it. The story of my high school life, really. I would never allow myself to remember anything that might bother me deep down.  
  
Brian had got an academic scholarship to Yale. Claire was off to some fancy Seven Sisters college. I didn't even bother to ask which one. Allison didn't even attend graduation. I never saw her again and, at that time, didn't give it a second thought.  
  
Four years later, I was twenty-two and moving from Columbia straight into the NFL, claiming one of the highest places in the draft system. I was an All-State and college All-American, named Columbia's player of the decade. The Atlanta Falcons snapped me up and for twelve glory-filled months I graced their promotional posters and billboards, the young wide receiver with a golden future ahead of him. I would often sit in my luxury apartment, usually with a beautiful woman, and wonder about what the rest of the Club was up to.  
  
But I never bothered to find out.  
  
X X X  
  
I sigh softly to myself as I pull myself up onto the familiar table, the same table where I sat that day. The past is a lot easier for me now, but I still don't like to dwell on it. Some of my actions are still raw with pain and regret. Especially the ones involving the Club. My fingers, rough from so many years clutching the abrasive surfaces of footballs, skim along the desk. I am amazed to find my mark is still there, carved into the wood. I trace the letters with my fingers. Andrew Clark – The Breakfast Club '84.  
  
Andrew. Only my dad ever called me Andrew. And Allison, in those few hours we spent together. I haven't heard my full name for many years. For so long I have been simply Andy. That has become my name. I think there are only two people I would ever allow to call me Andrew again. And I know they never will.  
  
I pull my satin jacket tighter around myself. The library is cold, just as it was that morning. My number and name stand out against the red background in bright yellow letters. The arm and breast bear the badge of my team of four years, The Washington Redskins. I signed for them as a youth sensation and developed with them into starting wide receiver. I'm proud of what I have achieved. Pro footballer at the age of twenty-two; all-American at twenty-three. I am in the top ten list of NFL offence players. My face grins up from magazine pages and out of TV screens. I have success, money and a string of beautiful woman at my beck and call. I have found my niche in life, but it has come at a price. It was a price I was always willing to pay though.  
  
The others, though, they haven't been so lucky. Claire tried to make it as actress but never got a single break. She did a couple of commercials and one awful movie the critics slated her for. Her career was over before it had even begun. At the same time I was taking the NFL by storm, Claire was making soft porn movies to try and support the daughter she'd fell pregnant with one drunken night by a man she couldn't even remember. Today she works in a beauty salon for $5 an hour, her life in tatters.  
  
Brian moved to New York to take up the offer of a teaching position at Cornell after graduating top of his class at Yale. Three months in, a youth gang attacked him walking home from the subway one night. They stabbed him multiple times and left him for dead. He somehow survived but hovered on the edge of death for days. I read about it in the paper. I wasn't so far away. I could've stopped by to see how he was. But I didn't. Brian recovered physically but he was never the same again. He quit his job and refused to stay in the city. He now teaches science in a tiny high school in a remote part of Canada's Northwestern Territories. He's still scared to be alone outside after dark.  
  
And as for Allison, she proved us all right. At nineteen, she had a mental breakdown. She tried to kill herself several times and ended up attacking a cop with the razor blade she was trying to slit her wrists with. She was sentenced to two years in a secure mental hospital. She was released on time but she could never function in normal society again. Today she lives in a voluntary mental unit, isolated from the outside world and with no desire to be part of it. I hope, in her own way, she's happy.  
  
Sometimes I think about picking up the phone and calling them all. Deep in my heart, I want to, really want to try and heal the wounds suffered all those years ago. I want to make things right, especially for the things I did.  
  
But I know I never will.  
  
I take one last look at the place where it all began. I know I'll never come here again. It's time to say goodbye. Lay to rest the ghosts that have haunted me for so long. There's nothing I can do for the others now. I had my chances to do that a long time ago, and I didn't take them.  
  
I have to live with that. And I know I always will.  
  
Andy Clark, number 14, June 1994. 


End file.
